Samsung’s 4TB SSD is built to replace your hard drive

It's not hard to get a capacious solid-state drive if you're running a server farm, but everyday users still have to be picky more often than not: either you get a roomy-but-slow spinning hard drive or give up that capacity in the name of a speedy SSD. Samsung may have finally delivered a no-compromise option, however. It's introducing a 4TB version of the 850 Evo that, in many cases, could easily replace a reasonably large hard drive. While it's not the absolute fastest option (the SATA drive is capped at 540MB/s sequential reads and 520MB/s writes), it beats having to resort to a secondary hard drive just to make space for your Steam game library.

Of course, there's a catch: the price. The 4TB 850 Evo will set you back a whopping $1,500 in the US, so it's largely reserved for pros and well-heeled enthusiasts who refuse to settle for rotating storage. Suddenly, the $700 2TB model seems like a bargain. Even if the 4TB version is priced into the stratosphere, though, it's a good sign that SSDs are turning a corner in terms of viability. It might not be long before high-capacity SSDs are inexpensive enough that you won't have to make any major sacrifices to put one in your PC.